[General Geiger]

I would like to say to Vermillion that, as per my first post in this thread, a slightly bizarre yet perfectly valid comparison can be made between Japan, 1945, and Iraq, 2003. The comparison is this:

They are both military actions intend to prevent from becoming necessary future ones that would cost at least ten times as many lives.

The nukings of Hiroshiuma and Nagasaki, though killing a quarter-of-a-million people, prevented the necessity of an American invasion that would have cumulatively resulted in at least ten times that amount of blood shed (the general consensus is that it would have cost American a million men, and Japan that + 50%. That is entirely ignoring the noted factor of the Russian's plan to invade Japan, of course.

My hypothesis regarding the current war - and it is one that I think stands up - is that it is a vast and long-range gambit to prevent a second Korean war from ever occurring. It is designed to demonstrate to the North Koreans that America is prepared, post-9/11, to mount a concerted ground campaign and take casualties in the process. They were not prepared to do this between the end of Vietnam and September 11th 2001, and that emboldened the North Koreans in their aggression towards South Korea during that time. However, NK is so much more militarily potent than Iraq that the US would, I am certain, very much like to avoid ever fighting a war there.

Let us assume that the Second Gulf War will cost, in the end, two hundred thousand lives. I think that is a reasonable estimate. With the advance of chemical and/or biological WMD, and the North Koreans acquirement of nukes, I think it is likely that a second war between North and South Korea would cost something in the order of two million lives. If the current war with Iraq prevents that from occurring, by frightening the North Koreans into plassitude by demonstrating America's resolve against vicious dictatorships, then it will by extension have saved ten times the lives it cost - like August 6th, 1945.

I think it's a pretty neat comparison. Any views?

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It is interesting to hypothesise, in a futile yet interesting alternate history scenario, what would have happened had the Americans not dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Americans and the Russians would probably have managed to invade at roughly the same time, sometime in 1946, and it is conceivable that the battle for Japan would have turned into a desperate race between the USA and Russia to acquire as much territory as possible before coming up against the front lines of the other invader. Maybe the USA and Russia would have ended up fighting each other as well as Japan, and the Japanese mainland would have been the site of a years-long, confused, utterly ghastly ground war costing many millions of lives. With Russia and Japan's total disregard of human life - the former due to being used to general hardship and ghastly treatment, aka their tough physical climate and treatment at the hands of the Germans; the latter due to their general "no surrender" psyche - forcing the Americans to behave similarly, Japan would likely have turned into a holocaustic conventional-weapons battlefield, with three sides completely at odds with each other, the defending Japanese able to take advantage of the confusion to cause bloody chaos. It would have truly been a case like that propounded by Japan until shortly before their surrende, of fighting the invaders until they were pushed out or every citizen lay dead.